When dealing with images that have been imported into a computer from some other medium (such as with a slide scanner, a film scanner, a flatbed scanner, digital camera, etc.) there are almost always two problems. One problem is that the document to be scanned is not always perfectly oriented with respect to the scanning device. For example, a photograph may have been placed on a flatbed scanner slightly crooked so that the edges of the scanned photograph are not perfectly horizontal/vertical relative to the scanning area, or the device may not be calibrated properly. As a result, a digital image of the document generated from the scanning process will also appear crooked when being viewed, for example, on a computer monitor. Another problem is that there is almost always some extra border around the image itself. An extra border may result because the document being scanned has extra white space around it (e.g., slide), or because the document is smaller than the scanning surface of the scanning device. However, the computer user is typically interested in viewing or printing a level image without a border.
Traditional methods of automatic image cropping are often ineffective because they require further manipulation of the image by the user. In particular, these existing cropping methods ignore the orientation issue, and only attempt to address the border removal issue. Such methods yield a final image that remains improperly oriented and, as a result, an image that still contains undesirable border or that has been overly cropped. Thus, the value of traditional methods to the user is considerably less than that of an automated method that consistently produces properly oriented and cropped images.
Thus, the need exists for a method and system for automatically adjusting and cropping a digital image to produce a final image that is immediately useful to the user.